Christmas turns people into idiots and it needs to stop. Obviously it is going to stop soon. Next week will be New Year, and the wretched paraphernalia will be tidied away for another 11 months. I mean it needs to stop forever.
There is a reason every second Christmas movie is derived from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Here it is. Ebeneezer Scrooge, before his transformation into a less interesting person, expressed a view held – if only intermittently – by every thinking person. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer,” he says in the opening part. Damn straight, man. Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life knew this too (though George Bailey is really the Scrooge in Frank Capra’s film).
Few of those Scrooges, sub-Scrooges and pseudo-Scrooges get to the real meat of the problem. Christmas pop culture is, and always has been, a nauseating orgy of lowest common denominators.
“Oh, no it isn’t!”
Top recipes of 2023: The dishes you savoured most from our food writers this year
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
Christmas gifts that can’t be wrapped: From unique flight experiences to spa days and hotel stays
Christmas tech for kids: great gift ideas with safety features for parental peace of mind
“Oh, yes it is!”
“Oh, no…”
“He’s behind you!
Do you see what I mean? Do you?
It would not be quite correct to say the worst song by any artist who has once released a Christmas song is invariably that tune. But Ho, Ho, Jolly Jesus Sleighbells (or whatever) is usually the worst of their work that has not been banished to the seventh circle of obscurity.
It was only a year ago that I bravely denounced Happy Christmas (War is Over) as the signature missive from John Lennon’s period of imperial sanctimony. Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time by his old friend Paul McCartney would, if not for all those seasonal “ding dongs”, be played no more often than the least popular song on Red Rose Speedway. The less said about the annually recurring atrocities from Shakin’ Stevens and Boney M the sooner we’ll cease waking in a cold sweat.
But let’s not lean too unkindly on artists with talent. The real culprits here are the makeweights whose tuneless clamour ends up on X-Mas compilations played at downmarket convenience stores. They now come in all flavours. There are ersatz crooners. There are off-the-peg R&B divas. There are bottom-feeding Belgian house DJs.
In About a Boy, Hugh Grant played a dosser living off the royalties of his dad’s Christmas hit. It seems unlikely those supplying tunes for the Cigs ‘n’ Booze Bumper Yule CD will trouser that sort of sum. Their greatest achievement is to prompt lone saddos in the loo-roll aisle – people like me – to drag out their phones and, aghast anything so atrocious could have escaped the studio, Shazam the offending track out of obscurity. “R U Kissy this Chrissy? by MC Rufus? Jingle my Tingle by Melody Smoothvibe?” Where is this stuff coming from? Can we make it stop?
The pop cultural avalanche is only increasing in momentum. A few decades ago, you got, maybe, one or two Christmas films a year. They were certainly awful. Thirteen years ago I named Christmas With the Kranks – the one where Dan Aykroyd terrorised Tim Allen into being a proper Christmas-fearing American – as one of the five worst films of the 2010s. In truth it was standing in for a modest swathe of similar atrocities.
But that regular trickle has now been replaced by a flood on the world’s favourite streamer. Netflix can currently offer you (takes deep, deep breath) A Storm for Christmas, Falling for Christmas, Too Close for Christmas, Christmas Love, Christmas Inheritance, A Christmas Miracle for Daisy… and dozens more. There is one with John Cleese and Kelsey Grammer. There is one with Sally Draper out of Mad Men. Is that Kathy Najimy in, ahem, Single all the Way? Sure. Why not? Wrap it up in red and green. Shove it in front of Uncle Pete.
It is entirely possible that people are sitting down before these things and watching them attentively as a snootier person might watch Todd Haynes’s Carol or Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander – to name two films with famous Christmas scenes – but it seems more likely they are playing as ambient background noise to the usual seasonal activities. The generic streaming Yule flick serves the same purpose as the low-grade compilation playing in the Lager Mart. It is there to reassure you it really is Christmas and that you are permitted to lower your standards accordingly. Listen to dross. Watch pabulum. Eat rubbish.
One might reasonably argue the Daddy of all Christmas songs begins with a neat affirmation echoed less economically by weaker successors over the following five decades. “It’s Christmas!” Noddy Holder bellows at the opening of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody. That’s what all this stuff is telling us in different (though not that different) ways and it’s not doing much else worth tolerating. Is there no escape?
